The brilliant minds of Marian Rejewski and his team whose doings changed the course of history and gave us the world as we know it today, unfortunately to this very day remain unknown except to a few. Cracking of the enigma, a german encryption machine which, at the time, was thought to be unbreakable, is what is commonly thought to have brought victory to the allies in WW2.
Marian Rejewski and Enigma
Rejewski was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist born in 1905 in Bydgoszcz, a town in the Prussian partition of Poland, also known by the German name Bromberg. He graduated from Poznań University in 1929 with his first degree in mathematics. While at college, he began attending the secret cryptology course for German-speaking mathematics students organised by the Polish Army. Its main purpose being to break modern German cipher machines by using mathematical methods such as combinatorics and probability. Rejewski and fellow students Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki were among the few who could keep up with the course while balancing the demands of their regular studies.
He took on the challenging, some would even say impossible, task of decoding the Enigma. He worked on the commercial model which was available to him and made quick progress with the code. Although the methods devised by Rejewski allowed for many messages encoded by the Enigma machine to be read, in September 1936 the Germans changed the coding procedure to introduce a more secure system. Again Rejewski, with assistance from Rozycki and Zygalski, was able to make good progress with the greater complexity which had been introduced, and by January 1938 they were able to read about three-quarters of the Enigma messages which were passed to them for decoding. However, following this, in December 1938, the Germans added further complexities, and once again left the Poles working on breaking the codes.
From left: Henryk Zygalski, Jerzy Różycki and Marian Rejewski
To learn more about the unbreakable german encryption machine called Enigma, the principles it functioned on and the methods by which it was decoded, click here.
Just five weeks before the outbreak of WW2, a replica of the Enigma machine, along with the decoding method were presented by Marian Rejewski to representatives of British and French military intelligence. Information given during this meeting were essential for the later work of Alan Turing, who`s credited with the decoding of the Enigma. His work was made possible by this, since all of the loopholes in procedure of enigma that Marian took advantage of were no longer there to use. Turing`s bombe- his code-breaking machines, allowed the British to listen in on every conversation made between Germans and played a big role in decimating a superior German Navy and Luftwaffe, possibly swaying the war in favour of allies.
Turing`s bombe machine
After the Germany army invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, Rejewski and his team were evacuated to Romania and then France where they continued working on deciphering German messages. In midst of the war they moved around a lot, trying their best to avoid capture and imprisonment, while also taking on different identities. Różycki died in January 1942 while travelling from Algiers, when the ship he was on sunk in the Mediterranean.
After the war ended, Rejewski returned to Poland to be reunited with his family. He chose not to return to his position as a mathematician at Poznań University (although it was still open to him) and instead took on a job of a supervisor of sales at Polish Cable. It wasn`t until 1967 that he shed some light on his involvement in breaking the Enigma cipher, when he wrote "Memoirs of My Work in the Cipher Bureau of Section II of the General Staff", which he left to the Polish Military Historical Institute.
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